Tag: Helen Keller

You kneel on the floor with two loop pedals in front of you. Above you hangs a projected red curtain and an empty spotlight. you say, “Oh, fuck it,” and hit one of the pedals, which causes The Star of Happiness theme song instrumental interlude to play.

“I was born with a degenerative eye disease called…” you hit the loop pedal twice quickly in order to catch “cone-rod dystrophy.”

“This means that, since I was ten years old, I’ve been going very slowly blind. I’ve occupied many positions on the sight/blindness continuum. I’m more blind than sighted now, but it’s not always been like this. Perhaps for you, going blind is the scariest, or at least one of the scariest, things imaginable. For me, thinking about losing another sense, especially hearing, is really scary.

“When I started reading books by and about Helen Keller, I suddenly developed a ringing in my ear. It was likely psychosomatic. (Wouldn’t have been the first psycho symptom I’ve exhibited.) Around that time, I had a dream: I was Helen, in the last years of her life when she was confined to bed by old age illness. We were insensible to sights and sounds As she had almost always been, but now, unable to move, we were deprived of the incessant, impulsive force that had launched her, a crazy deaf blind caterpillar, feelers electrified and electrifying, meteorically into a world that could not get enough of her, and of which she also could not get enough.”

Behind you on the screen, images of Helen from earlier in the show slowly spin around the projected spotlight, then break away.

“Now, after living nearly ninety years of a life that included such varied occupations as…” you pick up “political activist” and “vaudeville performer” into the loop and continue, “and ” after World War II, after America dropped bombs etc., she became an officially sanctioned, unofficial…” you catch up the following into the loop, “ambassador of American peace and good will,” and continue. “Two million Japanese welcomed her when she visited decimated Nagasaki and Hiroshima. They loved her that much!

“but my dream was set in a time past all that, so that I experienced what it would be like to have a sensory existence that extended no farther than the cocoon like bedding in which we were wrapped. Excepting slight tremors and vibrations through the floor, And the occasional touch of an attending hand…” you hit the loop pedal, “THERE WAS NOTHING.”

“However, in the double visioned way dreams sometimes unfold, I was trapped in her immobility with her and seeing her inert body as if it were an out of body experience, without much height or distance. The perspective was split: both inside feeling out and outside looking in.

“The in-body perspective was that of the cornered small animal trembling with the desire to escape, that of the suddenly quadriplegic wishing impotently to die, that of the tongueless victim left alone to tell her tale.

“While the out of body perspective was that of the achingly detached observer, that of the nonsensical buzzing fly, that of the sole audience at a wake. From here, the bed on which we lie, appears, in my mind’s eye, to be a tabula rasa, our body a lumpy virgin landscape.

You put down the mic and hunch over your workstation on the floor. You feed Helen Keller quotes from one pedal into the other, adding to the increasingly chaotic mix. Above and behind you in the projected visionscape, images likewise become disjointed and frantic.

Helen says, “Every one of us is blind and deaf until our eyes are opened to our fellow men, until our ears hear the voices of humanity.”

Helen says, “It is not required of every man and woman to do or be something great. Most of us have to be content to take small parts in the drama of life.”

Helen says, “I seldom think about my limitations, and they never make me sad. Perhaps there is just a touch of yearning at times; but it is vague, like a breeze among flowers.”

Helen says, “I really care for nothing in the world but liberty, liberty to grow mentally and spiritually, untrampled by tradition and arbitrary standards.”

Helen says, “Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.”

You hit the loop pedal one final time and the theme song plays its refrain, “Wonderful star of light wonderful star of light wonderful star of light…”

You are done. you look up into the audience, then crawl stage left as if you will exit, but stop at the edge to sit and apparently observe the strangely calm cycling of looping fragments. The soundscape grows louder while the lights, almost imperceptibly, grow brighter, until the stage and the audience are drenched in artificial light.

[These thoughts on aesthetics, understanding, poetry, beauty and the senses come from Keller’s 1908 book The World I Live In. “Inward Visions” is Chapter 9. You can read Chapter 6 on Smell HERE. The text has been hyperlinked, gently edited for apparent scanning errors and the odd British spellings Americanized.]

ACCORDING to all art, all nature, all coherent human thought, we know that order, proportion, form, are essential elements of beauty. Now order, proportion, and form, are palpable to the touch. But beauty and rhythm are deeper than sense. They are like love and faith. They spring out of a spiritual process only slightly dependent upon sensations. Order, proportion, form, cannot generate in the mind the abstract idea of beauty, unless there is already a soul intelligence to breathe life into the elements. Many persons, having perfect eyes, are blind in their perceptions. Many persons, having perfect ears, are emotionally deaf. Yet these are the very ones who dare to set limits to the vision of those who, lacking a sense or two, have will, soul, passion, imagination. Faith is a mockery if it teaches us not that we may construct a world unspeakably more complete and beautiful than the material world. And I, too, may construct my better world, for I am a child of God, an inheritor of a fragment of the Mind that created all worlds.

There is a consonance of all things, a blending of all that we know about the material world and the spiritual. It consists for me of all the impressions, vibrations, heat, cold, taste, smell, and the sensations which these convey to the mind, infinitely combined, interwoven with associated ideas and acquired knowledge. No thoughtful person will believe that what I said about the meaning of footsteps is strictly true of mere jolts and jars. It is an array of the spiritual in certain natural elements, tactual beats, and an acquired knowledge of physical habits and moral traits of highly organized human beings. What would odors signify if they were not associated with the time of the year, the place I live in, and the people I know?

The result of such a blending is sometimes a discordant trying of strings far removed from a melody, very far from a symphony. (For the benefit of those who must be reassured, I will say that I have felt a musician tuning his violin, that I have read about a symphony, and so have a fair intellectual perception of my metaphor.) But with training and experience the faculties gather up the stray notes and combine them into a full, harmonious whole. If the person who accomplishes this task is peculiarly gifted, we call him a poet. The blind and the deaf are not great poets, it is true. Yet now and again you find one deaf and blind who has attained to his royal kingdom of beauty.

I have a little volume of poems by a deaf-blind lady, Madame Bertha Galeron. Her poetry has versatility of thought. Now it is tender and sweet, now full of tragic passion and the sternness of destiny. Victor Hugo called her “La Grande Voyante.” She has written several plays, two of which have been acted in Paris. The French Academy has crowned her work. The infinite wonders of the universe are revealed to us in exact measure as we are capable of receiving them. The keenness of our vision depends not on how much we can see, but on how much we feel. Nor yet does mere knowledge create beauty. Nature sings her most exquisite songs to those who love her. She does not unfold her secrets to those who come only to gratify their desire of analysis, to gather facts, but to those who see in her manifold phenomena suggestions of lofty, delicate sentiments.

Am I to be denied the use of such adjectives as “freshness” and “sparkle,” “dark” and “gloomy”? I have walked in the fields at early morning. I have felt a rose-bush laden with dew and fragrance. I have felt the curves and graces of my kitten at play. I have known the sweet, shy ways of little children. I have known the sad opposites of all these, a ghastly touch picture. Remember, I have sometimes travelled over a dusty road as far as my feet could go. At a sudden turn I have stepped upon starved, ignoble weeds, and reaching out my hands, I have touched a fair tree out of which a parasite had taken the life like a vampire. I have touched a pretty bird whose soft wings hung limp, whose little heart beat no more. I have wept over the feebleness and deformity of a child, lame, or born blind, or, worse still, mindless. If I had the genius of Thomson, I, too, could depict a “City of Dreadful Night” from mere touch sensations. From contrasts so irreconcilable can we fail to form an idea of beauty and know surely when we meet with loveliness?

Here is a sonnet eloquent of a blind man’s power of vision:

THE MOUNTAIN TO THE PINE

Thou tall, majestic monarch of the wood,

That standest where no wild vines dare to creep,

Men call thee old, and say that thou hast stood

A century upon my rugged steep;

Yet unto me thy life is but a day,

When I recall the things that I have seen,–

The forest monarchs that have passed away

Upon the spot where first I saw thy green;

For I am older than the age of man,

Or all the living things that crawl or creep,

Or birds of air, or creatures of the deep;

I was the first dim outline of God’s plan:

Only the waters of the restless sea

And the infinite stars in heaven are old to me.

I am glad my friend Mr. Stedman knew that poem while he was making his Anthology, for knowing it, so fine a poet and critic could not fail to give it a place in his treasure-house of American poetry. The poet, Mr. Clarence Hawkes, has been blind since childhood; yet he finds in nature hints of combinations for his mental pictures. Out of the knowledge and impressions that come to him he constructs a masterpiece which hangs upon the walls of his thought. And into the poet’s house come all the true spirits of the world.

It was a rare poet who thought of the mountain as “the first dim outline of God’s plan.” That is the real wonder of the poem, and not that a blind man should speak so confidently of sky and sea. Our ideas of the sky are an accumulation of touch-glimpses, literary allusions, and the observations of others, with an emotional blending of all. My face feels only a tiny portion of the atmosphere; but I go through continuous space and feel the air at every point, every instant. I have been told about the distances from our earth to the sun, to the other planets, and to the fixed stars. I multiply a thousand times the utmost height and width that my touch compasses, and thus I gain a deep sense of the sky’s immensity.

Move me along constantly over water, water, nothing but water, and you give me the solitude, the vastness of ocean which fills the eye. I have been in a little sail-boat on the sea, when the rising tide swept it toward the shore. May I not understand the poet’s figure: “The green of spring overflows the earth like a tide”? I have felt the flame of a candle blow and flutter in the breeze. May I not, then, say: “Myriads of fireflies flit hither and thither in the dew-wet grass like little fluttering tapers”?

Combine the endless space of air, the sun’s warmth, the clouds that are described to my understanding spirit, the frequent breaking through the soil of a brook or the expanse of the wind-ruffled lake, the tactual undulation of the hills, which I recall when I am far away from them, the towering trees upon trees as I walk by them, the bearings that I try to keep while others tell me the directions of the various points of the scenery, and you will begin to feel surer of my mental landscape. The utmost bound to which my thought will go with clearness is the horizon of my mind. From this horizon I imagine the one which the eye marks.

Touch cannot bridge distance,–it is fit only for the contact of surfaces,–but thought leaps the chasm. For this reason I am able to use words descriptive of objects distant from my senses. I have felt the rondure of the infant’s tender form. I can apply this perception to the landscape and to the far-off hills.

[“SMELL, THE FALLEN ANGEL” is Chapter SIX of The World I Live In (originally published in 1908), a magnificent book that tells of sensations beyond seeing and hearing. It is also the book from which I took the heartbreaking preface that ends Helen Keller Tries To Tell You Her Story. This has been gently edited for apparent scanning errors and the odd British spellings Americanized.

Helen Keller, Los Angeles Times, 1920.

FOR some inexplicable reason the sense of smell does not hold the high position it deserves among its sisters. There is something of the fallen angel about it. When it woos us with woodland scents and beguiles us with the fragrance of lovely gardens, it is admitted frankly to our discourse. But when it gives us warning of something noxious in our vicinity, it is treated as if the demon had got the upper hand of the angel, and is relegated to outer darkness, punished for its faithful service. It is most difficult to keep the true significance of words when one discusses the prejudices of mankind, and I find it hard to give an account of odor-perceptions which shall be at once dignified and truthful.

In my experience smell is most important, and I find that there is high authority for the nobility of the sense which we have neglected and disparaged. It is recorded that the Lord commanded that incense be burnt before him continually with a sweet savor. I doubt if there is any sensation arising from sight more delightful than the odors which filter through sun-warmed, wind-tossed branches, or the tide of scents which swells, subsides, rises again wave on wave, filling the wide world with invisible sweetness. A whiff of the universe makes us dream of worlds we have never seen, recalls in a flash entire epochs of our dearest experience. I never smell daisies without living over again the ecstatic mornings that my teacher and I spent wandering in the fields, while I learned new words and the names of things. Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across a thousand miles and all the years we have lived. The odor of fruits wafts me to my Southern home, to my childish frolics in the peach orchard. Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief. Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents that start awake sweet memories of summers gone and ripening grain fields far away.

The faintest whiff from a meadow where the new-mown hay lies in the hot sun displaces the here and the now. I am back again in the old red barn. My little friends and I are playing in the haymow. A huge mow it is, packed with crisp, sweet hay, from the top of which the smallest child can reach the straining rafters. In their stalls beneath are the farm animals. Here is Jerry, unresponsive, unbeautiful Jerry, crunching his oats like a true pessimist, resolved to find his feed not good–at least not so good as it ought to be. Again I touch Brownie, eager, grateful little Brownie, ready to leave the juiciest fodder for a pat, straining his beautiful, slender neck for a caress. Nearby stands Lady Belle, with sweet, moist mouth, lazily extracting the sealed-up cordial from timothy and clover, and dreaming of deep June pastures and murmurous streams.

The sense of smell has told me of a coming storm hours before there was any sign of it visible. I notice first a throb of expectancy, a slight quiver, a concentration in my nostrils. As the storm draws nearer, my nostrils dilate the better to receive the flood of earth-odors which seem to multiply and extend, until I feel the splash of rain against my cheek. As the tempest departs, receding farther and farther, the odors fade, become fainter and fainter, and die away beyond the bar of space.

I know by smell the kind of house we enter. I have recognized an old-fashioned country house because it has several layers of odors, left by a succession of families, of plants, perfumes, and draperies.

In the evening quiet there are fewer vibrations than in the daytime, and then I rely more largely upon smell. The sulfuric scent of a match tells me that the lamps are being lighted. Later I note the wavering trail of odor that flits about and disappears. It is the curfew signal; the lights are out for the night.

Out of doors I am aware by smell and touch of the ground we tread and the places we pass. Sometimes, when there is no wind, the odors are so grouped that I know the character of the country, and can place a hayfield, a country store, a garden, a barn, a grove of pines, a farmhouse with the windows open.

The other day I went to walk toward a familiar wood. Suddenly a disturbing odor made me pause in dismay. Then followed a peculiar, measured jar, followed by dull, heavy thunder. I understood the odor and the jar only too well. The trees were being cut down. We climbed the stone wall to the left. It borders the wood which I have loved so long that it seems to be my peculiar possession. But to-day an unfamiliar rush of air and an unwonted outburst of sun told me that my tree friends were gone. The place was empty, like a deserted dwelling. I stretched out my hand. Where once stood the steadfast pines, great, beautiful, sweet, my hand touched raw, moist stumps. All about lay broken branches, like the antlers of stricken deer. The fragrant, piled-up sawdust swirled and tumbled about me. An unreasoning resentment flashed through me at this ruthless destruction of the beauty that I love. But there is no anger, no resentment in nature. The air is equally charged with the odors of life and of destruction, for death equally with growth forever ministers to all-conquering life. The sun shines as ever, and the winds riot through the newly opened spaces. I know that a new forest will spring where the old one stood, as beautiful, as beneficent.

Touch sensations are permanent and definite. Odors deviate and are fugitive, changing in their shades, degrees, and location. There is something else in odor which gives me a sense of distance. I should call it horizon–the line where odor and fancy meet at the farthest limit of scent.

Smell gives me more idea than touch or taste of the manner in which sight and hearing probably discharge their functions. Touch seems to reside in the object touched, because there is a contact of surfaces. In smell there is no notion of relievo [relief], and odor seems to reside not in the object smelt, but in the organ. Since I smell a tree at a distance, it is comprehensible to me that a person sees it without touching it. I am not puzzled over the fact that he receives it as an image on his retina without relievo, since my smell perceives the tree as a thin sphere with no fullness or content. By themselves, odors suggest nothing. I must learn by association to judge from them of distance, of place, and of the actions or the surroundings which are the usual occasions for them, just as I am told people judge from color, light, and sound.

From exhalations I learn much about people. I often know the work they are engaged in. The odors of wood, iron, paint, and drugs cling to the garments of those that work in them. Thus I can distinguish the carpenter from the ironworker, the artist from the mason or the chemist. When a person passes quickly from one place to another I get a scent impression of where he has been–the kitchen, the garden, or the sick-room. I gain pleasurable ideas of freshness and good taste from the odors of soap, toilet water, clean garments, woolen and silk stuffs, and gloves.

I have not, indeed, the all-knowing scent of the hound or the wild animal. None but the halt and the blind need fear my skill in pursuit; for there are other things besides water, stale trails, confusing cross tracks to put me at fault. Nevertheless, human odors are as varied and capable of recognition as hands and faces. The dear odors of those I love are so definite, so unmistakable, that nothing can quite obliterate them. If many years should elapse before I saw an intimate friend again, I think I should recognize his odor instantly in the heart of Africa, as promptly as would my brother that barks.

Once, long ago, in a crowded railway station, a lady kissed me as she hurried by. I had not touched even her dress. But she left a scent with her kiss which gave me a glimpse of her. The years are many since she kissed me. Yet her odor is fresh in my memory.

It is difficult to put into words the thing itself, the elusive person-odor. There seems to be no adequate vocabulary of smells, and I must fall back on approximate phrase and metaphor.

Some people have a vague, unsubstantial odor that floats about, mocking every effort to identify it. It is the will-o’-the-wisp of my olfactive experience. Sometimes I meet one who lacks a distinctive person-scent, and I seldom find such a one lively or entertaining. On the other hand, one who has a pungent odor often possesses great vitality, energy, and vigor of mind.

Masculine exhalations are as a rule stronger, more vivid, more widely differentiated than those of women. In the odor of young men there is something elemental, as of fire, storm, and salt sea. It pulsates with buoyancy and desire. It suggests all things strong and beautiful and joyous, and gives me a sense of physical happiness. I wonder if others observe that all infants have the same scent–pure, simple, undecipherable as their dormant personality. It is not until the age of six or seven that they begin to have perceptible individual odors. These develop and mature along with their mental and bodily powers.

What I have written about smell, especially person-smell, will perhaps be regarded as the abnormal sentiment of one who can have no idea of the “world of reality and beauty which the eye perceives.” There are people who are color-blind, people who are tone-deaf. Most people are smell-blind-and-deaf. We should not condemn a musical composition on the testimony of an ear which cannot distinguish one chord from another, or judge a picture by the verdict of a color-blind critic. The sensations of smell which cheer, inform, and broaden my life are not less pleasant merely because some critic who treads the wide, bright pathway of the eye has not cultivated his olfactive sense. Without the shy, fugitive, often unobserved sensations and the certainties which taste, smell, and touch give me, I should be obliged to take my conception of the universe wholly from others. I should lack the alchemy by which I now infuse into my world light, color, and the Protean spark. The sensuous reality which interthreads and supports all the gropings of my imagination would be shattered. The solid earth would melt from under my feet and disperse itself in space. The objects dear to my hands would become formless, dead things, and I should walk among them as among invisible ghosts.

On to the black stage she steps. You believe you hear her cane tap tapping, then stop. Papers rustle. Suddenly you are blinded by a brilliant light. The light, emanating from a lamp on her head like that of a miner, creates dark smudges of her facial features. Under the brilliant light and shadow face, you see what appears to be an oversized pamphlet. Its pages glow eerily with the angel-sleeves of her pale robe or jacket. At first you think the pages are blank, then you recognize them as braille-dappled.

She begins reading, “I was not born blind. I was not born deaf. I was not born a joke.”

Something childish sparks in you. “If Helen Keller fell down in the woods, would she make a sound?”

“What?” she asks. She seems disconcerted, not angry, and this titillates you.

“How did Helen Keller burn the side of her face?”

Helen Keller answers, “I answered the iron.”

“How’d she burn the other side?”

“It rang again.”

“Hahaha!” You are having fun. “What’s Helen Keller’s favorite color?”

“Purple,” she says.

“No,” you tell her, “Corduroy! “You laugh. These jokes are hilarious! Isn’t she a sport playing this funny game with you.

It is impossible to say if that is a scowl on her face with the light in your eyes. You decide it’s a smile. She seems to wait to see if you’ve finished and, having temporarily run out of jokes, you let her continue. “I was born in 18 80 in Tuscumbia Alabama on a postbellum plantation called Ivy Green. The fair daughter of a southern belle and a confederate soldier, I had–”

“How did Helen Keller’s parents punish her?”

It’s like the itch of a phantom limb. It must be scratched somehow, but she ignores you. “I had, they tell me, keen eyes. They were blue.”

On a screen behind her, the opening sickbed scene of the 1962 film The Miracle Worker projects silently. Your eyes drift to the moving black and white image, while Helen continues her story.

“In the winter of 1882 when I was nineteen months old, just learning how to talk, I was struck by a fever. Some say it was meningitis. Others say scarlet fever. It raged through my little body for two weeks and when it broke my family rejoiced.”

Talk of her family reminds you of your unrequited joke, and, you can’t help it, there is a little meanness in your voice when you repeat, “How did Helen Keller’s parents punish her?”

“Then the doctor told them the fever had left me deaf and blind, and they mourned.”

It’s like you’re not even there, like she’s forgotten you, sitting in the bright illumination of your personal, if somewhat erratic, spotlight. You raise your voice. “Come on, how did Helen Keller’s parents punish her?”

“They washed my hands out with soap,” she says, letting out an exasperated sigh, the sigh of a mother fed up with her little trickster.

“Nice,” you say, for this new attitude of hers does not bother you. You’re playing a part too. Besides, there are many punchlines to this joke. You ask again, “How did Helen Keller’s parents punish her?”

This time Helen answers with conviction, “They moved the furniture around.”

“Let’s have another!” you say.

“No,” she says, “they really did move the furniture around.”

“What?” You’re confused.

Helen continues, “Two inlets of perception cut off from the world. Taste touch and smell were all I had to connect with others. So I invented signs, little imitations of the world in which I lived. I mimed the act of buttering bread if that was what I wanted, or crawled on the ground, hands doubled in a fist, to show my little black friend–this was after the emancipation proclamation, that it was time to go hunting for guinea fowl eggs in the grass.

As I wrote in my youthful autobiography, The Story of My Life, In those days, a little colored girl, Martha Washington, the child of our cook, and Belle, an old Setter, and a great hunter in her day, were my constant companions. Martha Washington understood my signs, and I seldom had any difficulty in making her do just as I wished. It pleased me to domineer over her, and she generally submitted to my tyranny rather than risk a hand-to-hand encounter.”

The projection on the wall shifts abruptly to the famous food fight scene of the Miracle Worker–eight minutes of struggle between Helen and Teacher–foot-stomping, hand-slapping, grappling, utensils clattering, inarticulate cries, and non-verbal reprimands.

“I was strong, active, indifferent to consequences. I knew my own mind well enough and always had my own way, even if I had to fight tooth and nail for it.

“They called me the Tyrant of Ivy Green. I snatched food off the plates of others at table and flew into violent tantrums when corrected or deterred.” She pauses, thoughtful. “They tell me it was suggested I be put in an asylum.”

“What a home for retards? Hey, I got one for yuh …What did Helen Keller name her dog?” You are dying. This is so funny. “Nymphdrumpherlmf! Hahaha!”

Silence greets your hilarity.

“Ok you didn’t like that one.”

She shakes her head emphatically, raking the light across your visionscape.

“You’re gonna love this one… Why can’t Helen Keller drive?”

She has her hand on her hip. She is not amused. You wait until you can’t wait any longer. You explode, “Because she’s a woman! Hahaha!”

You laugh uproariously. She remains looking at you, you think, with those eye pits under the light. You cover your mouth and sigh. What can you do with a person so totally devoid of a sense of humor?

“You know,” she says testily, “it’s not easy to make a living as a deaf blind woman, even graduating from Radcliff, summa cum laude. I didn’t want to be a charity case. Andrew Carnegie Offered to give me a pension for the rest of my life… But of course I couldn’t possibly accept his money since he was a capitalist pig who, during our interview, threatened to take me over his knee and spank me for my pinko politics–can you imagine? I was a grown woman! Therefore, it was much more dignified to perform on vaudeville… Besides, being on stage gave me the opportunity to educate people about worker’s rights, and the injustices of our capitalist system.”

“Wow.” You say, allowing in a little snark, “that sounds like a fun show.”

“The amputee leader goes in first, cools himself off, drinks a load of water, and walks out the other side, and, it’s a miracle! He has a new leg!”

“…, where Laura had miraculously been taught to read, write and communicate using the manual alphabet.”

“The blind man offers to push the guy in the wheelchair, but he gets refused because the guy in the wheelchair wants to be mister independent and insists the blind man goes ahead first.”

Helen calls, “Dickens!” to someone over your shoulder, perhaps the guy up in the sound booth, but you don’t turn around to look. You want to finish your joke.

You talk faster, “So the blind man goes in, splashes around, drinks a load of water walks out the other side and, whoa, it’s a fucking miracle! He can see!”

“Dickens?” she calls again.

You are frantic to get to your punchline. “Now the guy in the wheelchair is getting really excited , starts pushing with all his might, goes into the water, cools off, drinks, goes out the other side and lo and behold…”

She shouts, “Dickens!” which forces you to scream out, “New tires!”

You laugh uproariously until the authoritative electronic English voice–a voice like Charles Dickens robot ghost–blares from the PA, “Long before I looked upon her, the help had come. her face was radiant with intelligence and pleasure. Her hair, braided by her own hands, was bound about a head, whose intellectual capacity and development were beautifully expressed in its graceful outline, and its broad open brow; her dress, arranged by herself–”

“You mean she dressed herself?” you interrupt, “Very impressive.”

“Be quiet,” she says to you and pulls out a flask from an inner pocket. “Go on Charles,” she says to the voice over your shoulder, and takes a giant swig.

You are stunned . Helen Keller drinks?

“…was a pattern of neatness and simplicity; the work she had knitted lay beside her; her writing-book was on the desk she leaned upon. – From the mournful ruin of such bereavement, there had slowly risen up this gentle, tender, guileless, grateful-hearted being.”

“Ugh,” you say. “dickens at his cheesiest.”

“Shh!” she rebukes.

Charles continues, “Like other inmates of that house, she had a green ribbon bound round her eyelids. A doll she had dressed lay near upon the ground. I took it up, and saw that she had made a green fillet such as she wore, and fastened it about its mimic eyes.”

“Ha!” you say, triumphant, “Even blind people don’t like to look at blind eyes! But what was Dickens doing visiting some deaf-blind chick anyway?”

“Laura was famous,” she tells you, as if you were a child. “Thousands of people visited her at the Perkins School.”

“You mean they put her on display!?”

She seems embarrassed, sensing a trap. “Sort of, but–”

“Like a freak show!”

“No. It wasn’t like that. It was about progress. About the possibilities of education and science. About enlightenment and humanitarianism.” She is regaining momentum.

“Uh huh. Did they charge money?”

“Not exactly,” she says softly, the pool of lamplight falling at her feet.

“But I bet she brought in lots of dough for that blind school.”

“Well yes, and is that so bad?” She perks up. “I mean, that helped the Perkins Institute educate Teacher and send her to me…” She grows fanatical. “to rescue me from an irrevocable descent into complete animalistic degeneracy!”

You’ve got nothing to say to that. She looks pleased. She returns her attention to her book. She shuffles her braille book one way, then the other. The oversized pages have been printed on perforated sheets, which suddenly cascade to the floor. She pulls the accordion back together and tries to find her place. This is painful to watch. You do the peeking out through fingers thing in your commiseration with her discomfort.

Suddenly she flings the pages over her shoulder and wings it. You’d suspected all along that she didn’t need them; it is her story after all.

“Anne Sullivan Macy, Teacher, was blind as a child and, though a series of operations restored much of her sight, she always had trouble with her eyes.”

“Ha! The blind teaching the blind!”

She ignores you. She removes her jacket with the angel sleeves. At some point she has removed her miner’s lamp. How had you not noticed this or the fact that she is you suddenly see that she is quite attractive.

“Teacher’s life started out much worse than mine. She was the daughter of Irish immigrants. Her mother died when she was a child and her father was an alcoholic who abused her and her siblings.”

“Hey,” you try lamely, “did you hear the one about the Irish guy who went to a private investigator because he’d lost his temper?”

She does not miss a beat. “When her mother died, Teacher was put into an orphanage, where she learned early to fight. She was uniquely qualified to tame the tyrant of Ivy Green. In fact, some people called her methods unsound.” Her voice has changed registers; now it is sultry, inviting.

“hmm,” you say, “this sounds interesting.”

“yes,” she says with flirty eyes, “I was impossible. Oftentimes Teacher had to resort to physical restraints and other extreme measures to dominate me.”

The food fight scene is back up and you glance at the black and white woman tackling the little girl. Your eyes return to Helen’s pretty face, then slip down to fixate on her boobs–how had you missed those? You are very glad the spotlight is not on you anymore. Reluctantly you look back up and realize with a little jolt that she is looking directly at you, or seems to be–for with the spotlight on her now, she must be quite blind to you sitting out here in the dark–and waiting for you to say something. “Mm,” you say, “go on.”

“Well, it was very hard for Teacher to do her work with my parents scrutinizing her every move.” Helen is fiddling with the black strap that dangles from the handle of her white cane. It is a little bit obscene the way she is fiddling with it. “Finally teacher convinced my parents that, in order to master me, she must remove me from their presence.” She bats her long lashes at you. “We were installed in a little cottage some distance from the main house…”

She trails off, allowing you to follow. It dawns on you where she might be going with this and you smile at her. She seems to see and smiles back.

“And, in order to make me believe I was in a new and unfamiliar environment…Far from my family and completely reliant on Teacher… They…”

You burst in and together gleefully say, “moved the furniture around!”

“Yes!” she says, and theatrically raises her arm to present the final joyful water pump scene where Teacher (Anne Bancroft) drags the impossible Helen (Patty Duke) to the water pump and spells w-a-t-e-r into her hand while the water splashes over them and the light dawns and Helen understands language. All is joyful and triumphant. Bells ring and the movie rushes to the end.

“THE END” looms above her in all its Hollywood glory, and you are a satisfied spectator.

Helen Keller, on the other hand is not happy. “But I’m only 7 at the end of the movie. And I live to be 87.”

You feel mean again. You don’t understand what her problem is. “So? You were deaf dumb and blind. You learned how to quote talk–” you make air-quotes with your fingers, “what more do you want?”

She turns as if to leave, then turns back at the wall next to THE END. The spotlight constricts, haloing her.

THE END fades and a book entitled The World I Live In by Helen Keller opens with cinematic magic. There is music now and a page has its passage highlighted while Helen recites. “Every book is in a sense autobiographical. But while other self-recording creatures are permitted at least to seem to change the subject, apparently nobody cares what I think of the tariff, the conservation of our natural resources, or the conflicts which revolve about the name of Dreyfus. If I offer to reform the education system of the world, my editorial friends say, ‘That is interesting, but will you please tell us what idea you had of goodness and beauty when you were six years old?’ The editors are so kind that they are, no doubt, right in thinking that nothing I have to say about the affairs of the universe would be interesting. But until they give me opportunity to write about matters that are not-me, the world must go on uninstructed and unreformed, and I can only do my best with the one small subject upon which I am allowed to discourse.”

As I write this, I am sitting in a pleasant house, in a sunny, wide-windowed study filled with plants and flowers. Here I sit, warmly clad, secure against want, sure that what my welfare requires the world will give. Through these generous surroundings I feel the touch of a hand, invisible but potent, all-sustaining — the hand that wove my garments, the hand that stretched the roof over my head, the hand which printed the pages that I read.

What is that hand which shelters me? In vain the winds buffet my house and hurl the biting cold against my windows: that hand still keeps me warm. What is it that I may lean upon it at every step I take in the dark, and it fails me not? I give wondering praise to the beneficent hand that ministers to my joy and comfort, that toils for the daily bread of all. I would gratefully acknowledge my debt to its capability and kindness. I pray that some hearts may heed my words about the hand of the world, that they may believe in the coming of that commonwealth in which the gyves shall be struck from the wrist of Labour, and the pulse of Production shall be strong with joy.

All our earthly well-being hangs upon the living hand of the world. Society is founded upon it. Its lifebeats throb in our institutions. Every industry, every process is wrought by a hand, or by a superhand — a machine whose mighty arm and cunning fingers the human hand invents and wields. The hand embodies its skill, projects, and multiplies itself in wondrous tools, and with them it spins and weaves, ploughs and reaps, converts clay into walls, and roofs our habitations with trees of the forest. It compels Titans of steel to heave incredible burdens, and commands the service of nimble lackeys which neither groan nor become exhausted. Communication between mind and mind, between writer and reader, is made possible by marvelous extensions of the might of the hand, by elaborate reduplications of the many-motioned fingers. I have touched one of those great printing-presses in which a river of paper flows over the types, is cut, folded, and piled with swift precision. Between my thoughts and the words which you read on this page a thousand hands have intervened; a hundred shafts of steel have rocked to and fro, to and fro, in industrious rhythm.

The hand of the world! Think how it sends forth the waters where it will, to form canals between the seas, and binds the same seas with thought incorporate in arms of stone! What is the telegraph cable but the quick hand of the world extended between the nations, now menacing, now clasped in brotherhood? What are our ships and railways but the feet of man made swift and strong by his hands? The hand captures the winds, the sun, and the lightnings, and despatches them upon errands of commerce. Before its irresistible blows mountains are beaten small as dust. Huge derricks—prehensile power magnified in digits of steel — rear factories and palaces, lay stone upon stone in our stately monuments, and raise cathedral spires.

On the hand of the world are visible the records of biology, of history, of all human existence since the day of the “first thumb that caught the trick of thought.” Every hand wears a birth-seal. By the lines of the thumb each of us can be identified from infancy to age. So by the marks on the hand of the world its unmistakable personality is revealed. Through suffering and prosperity, through periods of retrograde -and progress, the hand keeps its identity. Even now, when the ceaseless ply of the world-shuttles is so clamorous and confused, when the labour of the individual is lost in the complexities of production, the old human hand, the symbol of the race, may still be discerned, blurred by the speed of its movements, but master and guide of all that whirring loom.

Study the hand, and you shall find in it the true picture of man, the story of human growth, the measure of the world’s greatness and weakness. Its courage, its steadfastness, its pertinacity make all the welfare of the human race. Upon the trustworthiness of strong, toil-hardened hands rests the life of each and all. Every day thousands of people enter the railway train and trust their lives to the hand that grasps the throttle of the locomotive. Such responsibility kindles the imagination! But more profound is the thought that the destiny and the daily life of mankind depend upon countless obscure hands that are never lifted up in any dramatic gesture to remind the world of their existence. In Sartor Resartus Carlyle expresses our obligation to the uncelebrated hands of the worker:

“Venerable to me is the hard Hand; crooked and coarse; wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of the Sceptre of this Planet. . . . Hardly entreated Brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed: thou wert our Conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so marred. For in thee, too, lay a god-created Form, but it was not to be unfolded; encrusted must it stand with the thick adhesions and defacements of Labour: and thy body, like thy soul, was not to know freedom.”

But wherefore these deformities and defacements? Wherefore this bondage that cramps the soul? A million tool-hands are at our service, tireless and efficient, having neither heart nor nerve. Why do they not lift the burden from those bowed shoulders? Can it be that man is captive to his own machine, manacled to his own handiwork, like the convict chained to the prison-wall that he himself has built? Instruments multiply, they incorporate more and more of the intelligence of men; they not only perform coarse drudgery, but also imitate accurately many of the hand’s most difficult dexterities. Still the God-created Form is bowed. Innumerable souls are still denied their freedom. Still the fighter of our battles is maimed and defrauded.

Once I rejoiced when I heard of a new invention for the comfort of man. Taught by religion and a gentle home life, nourished with good books, I could not but believe that all men had access to the benefits of inventive genius. When I heard that locomotives had doubled in size and speed, I thought: “The food of the wheat-fields will come cheaper to the poor of the cities now/’ and I was glad. But flour costs more to-day than when I read of those great new engines. Why do not improved methods of milling and transportation improve the dinner of the poor? I supposed that in our civilization all advances benefited every man. I imagined that every worthy endeavour brought a sure reward. I had felt in my life the touch only of hands that uphold the weak, hands that are all eye and ear, charged with helpful intelligence. I believed that people made their own conditions, and that, if the conditions were not always of the best, they were at least tolerable, just as my infirmity was tolerable.

As the years went by and I read more widely, I learned that the miseries and failures of the poor are not always due to their own faults, that multitudes of men, for some strange reason, fail to share in the much-talked-of progress of the world. I shall never forget the pain and amazement which I felt when I came to examine the statistics of blindness, its causes, and its connection with other calamities that befall thousands of my fellow-men. I learned how workmen are stricken by the machine hands that they are operating. It became clear to me that the labour-saving machine does not save the labourer. It saves expense and makes profits for the owner of the machine. The worker has no share in the increased production due to improved methods; and, what is worse, as the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill. The multipotent machine displaces the very hand that created it. The productivity of the machine seems to be valued above the human hand; for the machine is often left without proper safeguards, and so hurts the very life it was intended to serve.

Step by step my investigation of blindness led me into the industrial world. And what a world it is! How different from the world of my beliefs! I must face unflinchingly a world of facts — a world of misery and degradation, of blindness, crookedness, and sin, a world struggling against the elements, against the unknown, against itself. How reconcile this world of fact with the bright world of my imagining? My darkness had been filled with the light of intelligence, and, behold, the outer day-lit world was stumbling and groping in social blindness! At first I was most unhappy; but deeper study restored my confidence. By learning the sufferings and burdens of men, I became aware as never before of the life-power that has survived the forces of darkness, the power which, though never completely victorious, is continuously conquering. The very fact that we are still here carrying on the contest against the hosts of annihilation proves that on the whole the battle has gone for humanity. The world’s great heart has proved equal to the prodigious undertaking which God set it. Rebuffed, but always persevering; self-reproached, but ever regaining faith; undaunted, tenacious, the heart of man labours toward immeasurably distant goals. Discouraged not by difficulties without, or the anguish of ages within, the heart listens to a secret voice that whispers: “Be not dismayed; in the future lies the Promised Land. ”

When I think of all the wonders that the hand of man has wrought, I rejoice, and am lifted up. It seems the image and agent of the Hand that upholds us all. We are its creatures, its triumphs, remade by it in the ages since the birth of the race. Nothing on earth is so thrilling, so terrifying, as the power of our own hands to keep us or mar us. All that man does is the hand alive, the hand manifest, creating and destroying, itself the instrument of order and demolition. It moves a stone, and the universe undergoes a readjustment. It breaks a clod, and new beauty bursts forth in fruits and flowers, and the sea of fertility flows over the desert.

With our hands we raise each other to the heights of knowledge and achievement, and with the same hands we plunge each other into the pit. I have stood beside a gun which they told me could in a few minutes destroy a town and all the people in it. When. I learned how much the gun cost, I thought: “Enough labour is wasted on that gun to build a town full of clean streets and wholesome dwellings !” Misguided hands that destroy their own handiwork and deface the image of God! Wonderful hands that wound and can bind up, that make sore and can heal, suffering all injuries, yet triumphant in measureless enterprise! What on earth is like unto the hands in their possibilities of good and evil? So much creative power has God deputed to us that we can fashion human beings round about with strong sinews and noble limbs, or we can shrivel them up, grind living hearts and living hands in the mills of penury. This power gives me confidence. But because it is often misdirected, my confidence is mingled with discontent.

“Why is it,” I asked, and turned to the literature of our day for an answer, “why is it that so many workers live in unspeakable misery?” With their hands they have builded great cities and they cannot be sure of a roof over their heads. With their hands they have opened mines and dragged forth with the strength of their bodies the buried sunshine of dead forests, and they are cold. They have gone down into the bowels of the earth for diamonds and gold, and they haggle for a loaf of bread. With their hands they erect temple and palace, and their habitation is a crowded room in a tenement. They plough and sow and fill our hands with flowers while their own hands are full of husks.

In our mills, factories, and mines, human hands are herded together to dig, to spin, and to feed the machines that they have made, and the product of the machine is not theirs. Day after day naked hands, without safeguard, without respite, must guide the machines under dangerous and unclean conditions. Day after day they must keep firm hold of the little that they grasp of life, until they are hardened, brutalized. Still the portent of idle hands grows apace, and the hand-to-hand grapple waxes more fierce. O pitiful blindness! O folly that men should allow such contradictions — contradictions that violate not only the higher justice but the plainest common sense. How do the hands that have achieved the Mauretania become so impotent that they cannot save themselves from drowning? How do our hands that have stretched railways and telegraphs round the world become so shortened that they cannot redeem themselves?

Why is it that willing hands are denied the prerogative of Labour, that the hand of man is against man? At the bidding of a single hand thousands rush to produce, or hang idle. Amazing that hands which produce nothing should be exalted and jewelled with authority! In yonder town the textile mills are idle, and the people want shoes. Fifty miles away, in another town, the shoe factories are silent, and the people want clothes. Between these two arrested forces of production is that record of profits and losses called the Market. The buyers of clothes and shoes in the market are the workers themselves; but they cannot buy what their hands have made. Is it not unjust that the hands of the world are not subject to the will of the workers, but are driven by the blind force of Necessity to obey the will of the few? And who are these few? They are themselves the slaves of the Market and the victims of Necessity.

Driven by the very maladjustments that wound it, and enabled by its proved capacity for readjustment and harmony, society must move onward to a state in which every hand shall work and reap the fruits of its own endeavour, no less, no more. This is the third world which I have discovered. From a world of dreams I was plunged into a world of fact, and thence I have emerged into a society which is still a dream, but rooted in the actual. The commonwealth of the future is growing surely out of the state in which we now live. There will be strife, but no aimless, self-defeating strife. There will be competition, but no soul-destroying, hand-crippling competition. There will be only honest emulation in cooperative effort. There will be example to instruct, companionship to cheer, and to lighten burdens. Each hand will do its part in the provision of food, clothing, shelter, and the other great needs of man, so that if poverty comes all will bear it alike, and if prosperity shines all will rejoice in its warmth.

There have been such periods in the history of man. Human nature has proved itself capable of equal cooperation. But the early communist societies of which history tells us were primitive in their methods of production — half civilized, as we say who dare call our present modes of life civilization! The coming age will be complex, and will relinquish nothing useful in the methods which it has learned in long struggles through tyrannies and fierce rivalries of possession. To the hand of the world belongs the best, the noblest, the most stupendous task, the subjection of all the forces of nature to the mind of man, the subjection of physical strength to the might of the spirit. We are still far from this loftiest of triumphs of the hand. Its forces are still to be disciplined and organized. The limbs of the world must first be restored. In order that no limb may suffer, and that none may keep the others in bondage, the will of the many must become self-conscious and intelligently united. Then the hand — the living power of man, the hewer of the world — will be laid with undisputed sway upon the machine with which it has so long been confounded. There will be abundance for all, and no hands will cry out any more against the arm of the mighty. The hand of the world will then have achieved what it now obscurely symbolizes — the uplifting and regeneration of the race, all that is highest, all that is creative, in man.

“ASK ME WHAT I THINK OF CAPITALISM” That was the sign I made and carried with me to Occupy Wall Street Sunday. We finally made it to Zuccotti Park, after the fact from the standpoint of many who think the movement of the physical place is dead. But it was exhilarating for me and my companions nonetheless.

Besides me and my sign there was:

1 Igor GuideDog (Mr. Popularity)

2 Caroline (blind friend with cane)

3 David (filmmaker with old school Lomo Kino camera that took 30 seconds of footage and 10 minutes to reload

4 How to engage with other blind people–actually I’m lying this was not a concern. I just wanted to say to people “hey you wanna feel my sign”! this proved to be fun.

5 How to get the words on the poster without busting out the old spray paints and upsetting domestic odor 6 How to make letters legible to sighted people when you can’t see

On the night before our outing, time was dwindling and I’d not made the stencils I had considered. I finally hit upon using Velcro tape to make letters but let me tell you this is not so easy as it sounds especially when you can’t see what you’re doing. At about midnight, after more than one tall boy, I began to despair that I was making a sign illegible to all. I almost stopped right there but then decided that a sign that no one could read also had its charm.

I did poop out after that first sign, but it turned out to be just the right thing and just enough of a burden. Not sure how I thought I’d carry six signs in one hand and Igor in the other even with a ride from Accessalimo on one end of the journey and help from friends on the other.

“ASK ME WHAT I THINK OF CAPITALISM” seems suggestive rather than provocative, but even so the lady at the Dunkin’ Do– –No you didn’t?! –We needed coffee and turned to The Man. Sorry. –nuts was indeed provoked she said to David (who was holding my sign for a moment, “who’s going to pay taxes if nobody has a job?” David answered diplomatically that indeed he does have a job and pointed me out as being the owner and author of the offending sign. I was only vaguely aware of this exchange and could not defend my sign since I was busy fending off passes on my German Shepherd by German tourists!

Basically, we did not even get coffee down our gullets when the games began and they did not stop till we left the park. Between the dog and the sign there was really not a moments rest – Igor gave out many Guide Dog FAQs (jesus I wish he had hands) and I talked about Helen and the sign and occasionally got to answer the question – with a big Star of Happiness smile – “I think it has outgrown its usefulness.”

People wanted pictures of me and my sign, people wanted interviews with me and my sign, people wanted words of wisdom from me (it’s that poet prophet thing, I tell yuh–my people have cornered the market!), and I happily got to say many times over, “you wanna feel my sign?!”

We were there to film some footage for a newsreel promo for The Star of Happiness, and we hopefully got some, but since David was using this little old school wind up camera, which may or may not have taken a single decent frame – we won’t know till the film is developed what we got, if anything. The irony is that I neglected to get him to take even a single pic with my iPhone though I grace the iPhones of many strangers and poor David spent much of his time figuring out how to use their cameras so that they could have their picture taken with us!

Ok, fine, so half the people wanting pictures with us were from some kind of disabled action committee (God I hope our footage turns out!) And most of the other half were just plain lame, but still I felt like some kind of crazy pied piper singing out Helen’s song of socialism!

It was fun talking to people about Helen’s politics because it allowed me to hide behind her strong convictions–at least partly. Admittedly many people asked me if I too were a socialist, and finally, by the twentieth time or so, I formulated an answer that did not get people riled up. I had been saying that I’m not really political, but they gave me shit for this and rightly so I suppose. I live in a society that is to a certain extent civilized, meaning, I think, that we are circumscribed by laws that inhibit and punish our selfish and insatiable parts, and so I cannot help being political. What I meant and finally managed to articulate, is that I’m not that interested in current events. I can’t help but take the long view – studied the classics as an undergrad, got my PhD in early modern lit, and just recently started reading books written in the twentieth century.

That said, I do feel a socialist at heart. I feel kindred with Helen’s politics though I myself am not an activist. I tried to tell someone who asked me about policy that I’m an idea woman not a policy woman, but he wouldn’t except that. Well, too bad because it’s true. I think in terms of historical and psychological trends and cannot wrap my brains around the details of changing today’s policy. Rather I found myself clutching at one large thread that runs through Helen’s critique of capitalism: greed. Greed and a culture, which not only allows for but encourages that greed to get totally out of hand. I’m not exactly talking about specific people here – I don’t believe that there are obvious distinctions between the selfish and the unselfish, the greedy and the not greedy. I think these things exist on a continuum, like most everything else I can think of. The fact is that humans will be greedy, shit I had a dog that could be greedy. We all want all we can have, right? Maybe not all the time–hopefully not all the time, but sometimes, right? Probably we have all felt that insatiability that leads to a loss of control, and an indifferent attitude regarding the suffering our bottomless gullets, pockets, loins, etc. might be creating in the lives of others.

What I hit upon in my interviews and discussions yesterday was the thought that the real change that OWS can have, and I think already has had, is to make greediness just a little more out of fashion, which, to those who are greedy for change, may sound trifling but to me, sounds like the kind of change that lays the groundwork for a paradigm shift!

So I guess my answer to the question “What do you think of capitalism?” is tamer than Helen’s, but of course I am not a card-carrying socialist and I have lived well past the dream of her Soviet Utopia, and so there is some irony in my answering with her “I think it has outgrown its usefulness. Rather I think if asked at this moment what I think of capitalism, I should answer the way I would about my own out of control tendencies, “Maybe a little more structure and restraint are in order?!”

[First published on November 11, 2011, when hopes were high and my dear Igor GuideDog was still among the living. To learn more about Igor GuideDog and the guide dog fund I set up in his honor, CLICK HERE]